The hidden dualism of transgenderism

A few days ago Australian papers ran a Washington Post story about Bill/Kate Rohr under the heading: “It’s not about the gender. It’s about the soul: Transgender at 70”. Despite a happy marriage to a childhood sweetheart, two adopted children and prestige as an orthopod, Bill finally found a never-before-experienced sense of fulfilment when at seventy years of age he opted for reassignment surgery.

The article argues that early life conditioning as an explanation for the transsexual phenomenon is old hat — the real reason is hormones, or rather the feelings that hormones give us:

“Today, an overwhelming number of doctors and scientists dismiss the idea that environment, or behavioural conditioning, causes a person to be transgender. Most agree that sexual anatomy, sexual orientation and gender identity are the result of three distinct developmental processes in the fetal brain. Yet only recently have researchers begun to tease out how that brain is masculinised or feminised. Hormones, it appears, play an essential role.”

I find this remarkable, palpably wrong, and in the interests neither of persons who identify as hetero nor of those who identify as trans. Gender is being defined as a hormone induced feeling, totally separate from anatomy, as if the development of sexual anatomy were distinct from those hormones in the first place.

Read here